Author: Kim du Toit

Bad Dads, BAD Dads

Anti-Gun Nannies

Apparently, CNN (who?  I dunno, never heard of them either) seems to have a problem with Dads buying their kids guns for Christmas:

CNN began the article with a story of an Oregon dad, Paul Kemp, who bought a hunting rifle for his son, Nathan, when he turned 16 years old. Nathan had been hunting with his dad since he was 7 years old.

CNN then stated, “Parents looking to purchase a firearm for their child for the holidays have to balance their hopes for the gift with the risks that come with such a purchase, such as an accidental shooting, suicide or the gun being used in a crime.”

In an attempt to bolster their position, CNN said, “For example, the teenage school shooting suspects in Oxford, Michigan, and Winder, Georgia, allegedly used firearms they had received as Christmas gifts from their parents, and those parents have faced criminal charges.”

I don’t want to get into dueling statistics here, but I just wonder how many deaths have been caused by teenagers getting into road accidents with cars given them by their parents?

Never mind;  giving guns to our kids for Christmas is a tradition that goes back generations, as these few ads prove:

Of course, as the Left hates the very concepts of both tradition and the family with a passion, these would be seen as pure evil.

Me, I just wish we could see more of them, updated for today’s market.

And I absolutely love this one:

…because as any fule kno, every man should have owned at least one Mauser in his lifetime.

If You Don’t Use It…

Deep Thoughts, Technology

…of course you’re going to lose it.  This post on Musk-X triggered a train of thought from me:

Just had a fascinating lunch with a 22-year-old Stanford grad. Smart kid. Perfect resume. Something felt off though. He kept pausing mid-sentence, searching for words. Not complex words – basic ones. Like his brain was buffering. Finally asked if he was okay. His response floored me.

“Sometimes I forget words now. I’m so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it’s not there, my brain feels… slower.”

He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain. And now his internal one was getting weaker.

This concerns me, because it’s been an ongoing topic of conversation between the Son&Heir (a devout apostle of A.I.) and me (a very skeptical onlooker of said thing).

I have several problems with A.I., simply because I’m unsure of the value of its underlying assumption — its foundation, if you will — which believes that the accumulated knowledge on the Internet is solid:  that even if there were some inaccuracies, they would be overcome by a preponderance of the correct theses.  If that’s the case, then all well and good.  But I am extremely leery of those “correct” theses:  who decides what is truth, or nonsense, or (worst of all) highly plausible nonsense which only a dedicated expert (in the truest sense of the word) would have the knowledge, time and inclination to correct.  The concept of A.I. seems to be a rather uncritical endorsement of “the wisdom of crowds” (i.e. received wisdom).

Well, pardon me if I don’t agree with that.

But returning to the argument at hand, Greg Isenberg uses the example of the calculator and its dolorous effect on mental arithmetic:

Remember how teachers said we needed to learn math because “you won’t always have a calculator”? They were wrong about that. But maybe they were right about something deeper. We’re running the first large-scale experiment on human cognition. What happens when an entire generation outsources their thinking?

And here I agree, wholeheartedly.  It’s bad enough to think that at some point, certain (and perhaps important) underpinnings of A.I. may turn out to be fallacious (whether unintended or malicious — another point to be considered) and large swathes of the A.I. inverted pyramids’ points may have been built, so to speak, on sand.

Ask yourself this:  had A.I. existed before the reality of astrophysics had been learned, we would have believed, uncritically and unshakably, that the Earth was at the center of the universe.  Well, we did.  And we were absolutely and utterly wrong.  After astrophysics came onto the scene, think how long it would take for all that A.I. to be overturned and corrected — as it actually took in the post-medieval era.  Most people at that time couldn’t be bothered to think about astrophysics and just went on with their lives, untroubled.

What’s worse, though, is that at some point in the future the human intellect, having become flabby and lazy through its dependence on A.I., may not have the basic capacity to correct itself, to go back to first principles because quite frankly, those principles would have been lost and our capacity to recreate them likewise.

Like I said, I’m sure of only two things in this discussion:  the first is the title of this post, and the second is my distrust of hearsay (my definition of A.I.).

I would be delighted to be disabused of my overall position, but I have to say it’s going to be a difficult job because I’m highly skeptical of this new wonder of science, especially as it makes our life so much easier and more convenient:

He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain.

It’s like losing the muscle capacity to walk, and worse still the instinctive knowledge of how to walk, simply because one has come to depend completely on an external machine to carry out that function of locomotion.

P.S.  And I don’t even want to talk about this bullshit.

The Impossible Dream

Communication, Politics

Like many people, I’ve been amused by Leftists all over the U.S. squealing about how they need to combat “right-wing” podcasters like Joe Rogan by setting up competitive podcasts which express those views of the Left (as though the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune,CNN, CSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC weren’t sufficient outlets for Leftist agitprop  already).

Clifton Duncan has one such take on this silliness:

They can never build “their own Joe Rogan.” The notion is ridiculous–not just because it evinces their tendency toward top-down control, but because their cult renders intellectual, political and philosophical exploration outside of narrow ideological parameters impossible. These people have psychotic meltdowns, blacklist peers, and cut off relatives over politics. They’re incapable of empathizing with anyone outside their congregation. For all their fetishizing of credentials, their masturbatory exaltation of their educations, they’re violently allergic to intellectual curiosity–how on earth COULD they “build” their own Rogan, or a Lex Fridman, whose curiosity and openness are part of their brand?

Well, yes;  all that’s true, and more besides.

But beyond their genetic inability to create a competitive “voice” lies one inescapable truth:  they can create all the podcasts they want, but they’ll only ever generate an audience of a few hundred thousand people (roughly, the equivalent of the NYT subscription base and/or CNN’s viewership).

I remember when Rush Limbaugh died, the Left was ecstatic because, they thought, the field was now open for radio shows like the leftist Pacifica to capture the radio audience for the Left.

Never happened, did it?  Because most Americans don’t buy into their shit.  Want proof?  Of the top dozen or so talk radio shows in the U.S., Sean Hannity alone has just over 14 million weekly listeners, and a huge percentage of the talk show audience listens to the likes of Dan Bongino, Mark Levin, Hugh Hewitt, Dana Loesch, Mike Gallagher, Glen Beck, Brian Kilmeade and Mike Berry at their various time slots during the day and night.  (You can’t combine them because there is considerable overlap in the conservative audience, who might listen to four, five or more shows during any given week.

The sole Left-wing radio host in the top dozen is Tom Hartmann (of Pacifica) whose midday show attracts some 7 million listeners per week, compared to his midday conservative competitors Dana Loesch and Dan Bongino, whose combined audience is more than double that, at nearly 17 million.

And just to be clear on the numbers:  Nielsen/Arbitron admits candidly that their numbers severely understate rural listenership, and always have.

Somehow, I suspect that farmers and country folk (mostly conservative) greatly outnumber any hippie communes out in the sticks.

So yeah, while the Left may have a systemic problem in putting together a non-traditional media voice, the principal reason they’re always going to fail is that Leftism per se  is hugely disliked by and abhorrent to the vast majority of Americans, FJB’s 81 million “voters” notwithstanding.  And the social adjuncts to Leftism (high taxes, gun control, uncontrolled illegal immigration, LGBTOSTFU and Big Government, to name but some) are each individually just as unpopular as Socialist government in toto.

Long may it ever be so.

Renaissance Man

Architecture, Beauty, Classic Beauty, Culture, Fine Art

What do you call a man who was a professor of Architecture at Turin University, photographer, writer, skier, inventor of engines and designer of race cars, acrobatic pilot and mountaineer?  Carlo Mollino.

I have to say that I’m not enamored of his exterior architecture designs — there’s way too much Gropius and not enough Athens, never mind art nouveau;

…although not all the time:

His interiors are a little too Scandi and not enough Edwardian:

…although his Teatro Regio in Turin is incredible:


…from the inside;  the outside?

…and of his furniture we will not speak.


(Follow the link above for a full exposition of all these, and more.)

But how can you not enjoy his design of something as mundane as a bus?

And then there was his Basiluro race car, which at Le Mans 1955 (yes, that Le Mans race) managed to reach 135mph with a 750cc engine (!) until it was forced off the track into a ditch by a Jaguar:

However, it was Mollino’s photography which first caught my attention (guess why):

And my favorite:

His ultimate expression was this statement:

“Humans matter only insomuch as they contribute to a historic process; outside of history, humans are nothing.”

And Carlo Mollino sure left his mark on the historical process, in so many fields.  Che uomo!